Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 807

At 73, Man Finally Gets Diploma Denied 55 Years Earlier For Defying Segregation

Evan Temchin/Knox College

'Off the Wall' @ 35

"What is Michael Jackson’s greatest album? The answer helps establish whether you were introduced to Jackson via Thriller, the crown jewel of his commercial legacy, or whether you were riding with him long before he donned the sequined glove—since Off the Wall, the classic album released 35 years ago this week, that represents Jackson at his most brilliant musically, and that may be the most perfect pop recording of the late 20th century.

Off the Wall is remembered as the first in a series of collaborations between Jackson and producer-arranger Quincy Jones that would redefine pop. Yet when Jackson and Jones first began to work together, on the set of  The Wiz , Jones was actually focused on another young black male vocalist, Luther Vandross, who had contributed “Brand New Day” to The Wiz soundtrack and who was featured on Jones’ 1978 recording Sounds ... and Stuff Like That.

That Jackson’s youthful professionalism impressed Jones—himself a veteran of the same chitlin circuit that produced Jackson and his brothers, in the form of the Jackson 5—is no surprise, but Jones also detected a certain something that Jackson possessed—charisma, genius, brashness—that would allow them to push music forward. And “You Can’t Win,” from The Wiz, was the first fruit of their partnership." -- Mark Anthony Neal
Read More at The Root.com

#JusticeforMikeBrown: “Over My Head I See Freedom in the Air”

#JusticeforMikeBrown: “Over My Head I See Freedom in the Air” by Ahmad Greene-HayesSaturday, August 9, 2014, Ferguson, Missouri police officers executed 17-year-old Mike “Mike Mike” Brown to death. Eyewitnesses say Brown was shot 10 times. My heart sank when I heard this news. I didn’t know Mike and I’ve never even stepped foot in Missouri, but because his life—his black life—was deemed insignificant in that painful moment, I mourn this brother, too. Alas, yet another black man has been killed. Mike was scheduled to begin his college career on Monday, August 11. Unfortunately, he will never move into a college dorm, attend higher education classes or even indulge in the fun and craze of college social culture. Mike won’t even be able to join a campus organization, voice his concerns about the world around him, and form a network with other college professionals or even graduate.
Like Mike, I am a black man. I could have been Mike and Mike could be me. I could have been lying on that hard Missouri concrete, and he could have been alive writing this piece. See the thing is those police officers did not see Mike. They did not see the young man he was or the black man he would grow to become. What they saw was blackness. And as is customary in contemporary policing practices, “See Black, Shoot.”
As a black man, I am afraid for my life. I am afraid to ride the NYC subway. I am afraid to walk the streets. I am afraid to drive in my car. I am afraid to take the garbage out past a certain time. I am afraid to look police officers in the eyes. I am afraid to say anything but, “yes sir” or “yes ma’am” to officers when they ask me questions. I am afraid to breathe. Police officers patrol our communities—black communities—like slave catchers. They gaze upon our black bodies, criminalize us before we speak or act, and more-often-than-not, attack us, choke us, sexually assault us, spit on us, sic dogs on us, all in the name of law enforcement.
These men and women who wear uniforms and have taken oaths “to protect and serve” do more damage than the criminals they purport as society’s greatest problematics. These officers take the law in their own hands—like the mobocracists of the past—they lynch with 9-millimeters, crowbars, mace and excessive force. Not only do they perform these undeniably egregious acts, but they are also almost never punished.
This summer has been a period of great trepidation for black communities nationally. On July 17 of this year, the Staten Island NYPD strangled 43-year-old Eric Garner, a black man and father, to death, despite his dying plea, “I can’t breathe.” Garner was funeralized about two weeks ago, and many have likened his demise to the killing of Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing character, Radio Raheem. Lee himself released a one-minute edited video proving that Garner, the chokehold victim, was the real-life incarnation of the murdered 1990s fictional character. The fact that those police officers reduced Garner’s black life to utter elimination, in that moment, was painful to watch.
But, in many ways that clip was like a scene in a horror film that I had seen replayed over and over all of my life. Garner’s murderers have yet to be indicted, even though his death was ruled a homicide. White racial supremacy, structural inequality and the West’s fascination with racialized and gendered Otherness are conduits by which the chokeholds of racist and heterosexist policing consistently steal life from the black and brown, the undocumented, the transgendered and a host of other marginalized identity groups. The extent to which these policing practices function are certainly informed by starkly racialized and gendered histories of oppression. Two weeks ago, Rosan Williams, a 27-year-old pregnant black woman was also put in a chokehold, like Garner, by an NYPD officer for “illegal grilling” in her Brooklyn neighborhood. Thankfully, Ms. Williams is still alive and her unborn baby was not harmed.
It is pure fact that black lives, historically and contemporaneously, have been subject to the oppressive arms of colonization, enslavement and neoslavery—from the pre-colonial African continent to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade of the 15thto 17th centuries to the present-day ills of the Africana diaspora. Saidiya Hartman argues in Lose Your Mother, that we are living in “the afterlife of slavery,” representative of the “skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment” inherent to black communities (6).
In many respects, Hartman’s assertion is similar, if not closely identical to claims made by many revolutionary scholars, including political theorist Joy James, “The old plantation was a prison; and the new prison is a plantation.” The plantation symbolizes unconstrained disdain for the poor, non-white, non-male, and non-heterosexual, evidenced most clearly by centuries of subjugation and exclusion. In America, full citizenship, human rights security and police protection are reserved solely for wealthy, cisgender, and heterosexual white men. This racial and gender configuration has life-threatening implications and complex repercussions for black men and black women.
America is obsessed with plantation politics, in fact, America is nostalgic of its former days—the unrestrained sexual exploitation of black women and the physical torture, castration and backbreaking labor enacted upon black men, coupled with the genocide of indigenous populations, the expansion of the frontier, the maltreatment of women, and other morally questionable facets of the colonial world. Today, this nostalgia arises in conversations about women’s reproductive rights, immigration reform, same-sex marriage debates and discussions surrounding the hyperincarceration of poor black women and men.
The nonstop murder of blacks, however, and the state’s unfair and racially fashioned policing of black people—since Jim Crow—is by far one of our society’s greatest examples of plantation politics reconfigured. In May 2014, Arizona State University Professor Ersula Ore was brutally assaulted by campus police officers for jaywalking while black and female, and recently, Florida State Attorney Angela Corey has vowed to prosecute Marissa Alexander again, with intent to pursue a tripled sentence of 60 years if Ms. Alexander is found guilty at her December 2014 trial, all for firing a self-defense shot into the air as a warning against her abusive husband. These kinds of events are commonplace.
Policing today resembles Jim Crow white terrorism from roughly fifty years ago, though it certainly has undergone several vicissitudes. It’s unsurprising then that two Florida police officers were recently exposed by the F.B.I. for having ties to the Klu Klux Klan (KKK). Though all police officers are not racist, sexist or connected to the KKK, what two things do the Klan and police departments across the land have in common? These two bodies are both the greatest killers of black lives and harassers of black people. Jonathan Ferrell. Sean Bell. Kimani Gray. Amandou Diallo. Rekia Boyd. Oscar Grant. Kathryn Johnston. Inity and Julia Marrow. And now, Mike Brown, among a long list of other black victims.
The existing state, as the progeny of colonial white heteropatriarchy, functions as the means by which the heirs of enslavers and colonizers—the Klan, white vigilantes, and police officers—are able to maintain power through physical violence. Slavery enabled this transgenerational preservation of power through the institutionalized racial hierarchy of the plantation, that of black and brown bodies at the bottom, followed by white women and poor whites, and of course, at top, the slaveholding class. Just as power has been passed down from one generation of white racists to the next, so has the “white gaze,” or what philosopher George Yancy describes—in reference to the Trayvon Martin case—as the “inherited, poisonous assumptions and bodily perceptual practices” by whites that deem the black body as “different, deviant, ersatz.”
These racial-cultural analyses aren’t new. Police officers have killed numerous black folks, and each time, think pieces are written and black people raise hell.
…This cycle must be broken.
Crowds of black people have been protesting Brown’s murder. They have been yelling. They have been screaming. They have been exposing the full depravity of the Ferguson tragedy through social media picture uploads, status updates and tweets using the hashtags #MikeBrown and #Ferguson. All with their hands raised high in the air—no weapons, no violence, no retaliatory acts directed towards police. As I watched the videos, viewed the images and joined in on the Twitter hashtag, the words of Bettie Mae Fikes’s 1964 upbeat adaptation of gospel song, “Over My Head,” came to me. It calmed my spirit. It made me realize that even though these tragedies are never welcomed, our people have overcome and can still overcome. It reminded me of the black men and women who came before me. It reminded me that the struggle was never over. It reminded me that “Can’t nobody turn me around” and that as a black man, I come from a lineage of trailblazers, revolutionary activists and troublemaking radicals.
Fikes introduced the song at a Sing for Freedom Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, where freedom singers and civil rights activists gathered. That same year, the Civil Rights Act was passed, which outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, and the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a network of civil rights groups that included CORE and SNCC, launched a massive effort to register black voters during what had become known as “Freedom Summer.” Even with these strides and civil rights victories, white-on-black racial violence persisted. Black people did not give up, however. They did not give in. They stood strong. They marched. They sang. And some even took up arms against white terrorists and police officers. They defended themselves. Fifty years after 1964, I urge black communities across the land to meditate on the freedom songs of our ancestors and to take a bold stand against racist policing. I employ us all to look up even as our heads and hearts hang low, for truly, over our heads is freedom—freedom for Mike and freedom for us yet alive.
***
Ahmad Greene-Hayesis a junior at Williams College, majoring in History and concentrating in Africana Studies. He is also a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, whose research interests include 20th century African American history, Jim Crow, White Terrorism, Black Communism and Women's History. Follow him on Twitter: @_BrothaG

Should Kids Get A Trophy Just For Showing Up?

Why Iggy Azalea Is Not Changing the Game: A Letter to ?uestlove

Dear ?uestlove,
I recently read your interview at TIME Magazine and found myself softly massaging my jaw. Let’s just say that it hit the floor quite hard. Frankly, I was surprised by your comments on Iggy Azalea and how you explained your views on her involvement in hip hop. There is no crime in admitting that Iggy’s music is catchy, or a summer banger. Children and adults alike are bobbing their heads to “Fancy” as hard as a car hitting a pothole, and there's something to be said about any music that can command the body into movement. However your thoughts, which reeked of post-racial rhetoric and beseeched the black community to simply “come to grips that Hip-hop is a contagious culture,” seemed to dance around the actual issues involving Iggy Azalea. Namely, the following: her appropriation of black southern dialect; the exploitative history of black cultural production; Iggy’s prominence in Hip-hop when black women have been denied artistic exposure; and her racism even while practicing an art form rooted in black American culture.
The landscape is changing, I do not disagree. But to adopt a color-blind method of acknowledging white rappers’ presence in hip hop is dismissive and unreliable. Iggy Azalea is popular because of white corporate ownership of the hip hop brand. She is popular because she is being marketed as the “blond white Australian woman who is running hip hop.” She is popular because women of color are habitually denied a stage to talk about the invisibilization of their life experiences. She is popular not because of her lyrical ability, but because she is an embodiment of Western beauty ideals and a perfect vehicle for proving the prevalence, the naivety, and the power of white supremacy. And when no black artist reached number one on the billboards within the past year – and  white artists who've appropriated forms of black music have – we must consider why Iggy Azalea is topping the charts and similar, more authentic artists aren't. 
?uestlove, I love you man; all that you’ve done for hip hop and music in general is indeed praise worthy. And it is because I love you and your work that I have to tell you how misguided your opinions are, or, at the very least, how lazily thought out they are. The issue is that they don’t reckon with the economic and structural reasons why someone like Iggy Azalea — despite the work that she’s put in and the music that she’s put out — is allowed artistic freedom in an art form that is not a part of her cultural history. More so, your views invisibilize the struggles many talented black people (specifically women of color like Rapsody, L.atasha A.lcindor, and Noname Gypsy who have worked for years to have their art recognized and are only barely gaining popular exposure) face in terms of corporate sponsorship and access.
Here is the issue: for every Iggy Azalea that is not checked for her privilege as a white artist capitalizing off of black artistic and cultural production in an industry dominated by corporate white supremacy, another handful of capable and talented black artists are denied the right to have their art seen. It’s not simply about black people accepting that “Hip-hop is contagious,” but about people increasing their awareness of who they are, how they interact with Hip-hop, and how privilege informs their place in an art form that is rooted in black American culture.
Iggy Azalea has proven time and time again that she is not interested in the reasons why hip hop exists in the first place. Rather, for her, it is a means of accumulating capital and, whether or not she knows this, committing the age old crime of white appropriation of black cultural production — all without paying homage to the racially charged historical reasons behind hip hop’s existence. I am saddened that you seem to be ignoring this.
Now, I too am an advocate for changes in hip hop that increase inclusivity. Since its inception, we’ve watched the art form grow to become arguably more inclusive of people that have been historically marginalized in its arena. Queer people of color – rappers like Le1f, Mykki Blanco, Cakes Da Killa, and Big Freedia, to name a few – are more openly, fearlessly affirming their presence, while women of color are carving out spaces for themselves to be seen, heard, and respected. Nonetheless, we have not come far enough. Misogyny, specifically misogynoir is still rampant in hip hop, as are queerphobia, homophobia, transphobia, and transantagonism.
We are at a pivotal point, a plateau of sorts: artists are shifting the genre in terms of the sound, but lyrical content is still rooted in the same oppressive ideas that drove the creation of hip hop. Still, there are people talking — people who want more from the genre as a whole: a sense of true progress, a shift toward more progressive creation. Writer and scholar M.K. Asante wrote an entire book on how the youth of this generation and the next can address the traumas wrought by white supremacy, historic and present realities of inequality, and hip hop’s narrow-minded beginnings.
I don’t want this to be misconstrued as me complaining about “culture vulturism,” as you put it. We can argue all day about whether white people making rap music is preying on black culture, or if white input in a product of the black American experience is necessary. Hell, as it stands white boys from the suburbs consume about 80% of Hip-hop. Wouldn’t it then make sense if white people had a say since they help commercial rap produce so much capital? But I think the issues at hand run deeper than both of these notions. People need to complicate how we think of white appropriation of ethnic cultural artifacts, and how often the messages of cultural forms are lost when blindly appropriated.
We need to think about how white supremacy and the exploitative history of black labor have paved the way for Hip-hop to be “run by a white blonde Australian woman,” or why, as you mention, “when you think of soul music… that’s a thing of the past.” We also need to think about how our voices will reverberate when we have gained a level of visible prominence.
It is incredibly troubling when prominent black artists who have had to work hard for their success begin to echo the mythic post racial dream that America refuses to wake up from. That’s you, ?uestlove. In a moment where America is trying to prove its colorblindness while minorities still suffer at the hands of racial discrimination, making oft-handed statements about cultural vulturism and simple acceptance of appropriation is lazily dangerous. As someone who has the emotional and intellectual sensibilities to acknowledge your own status as a target of racial discrimination, you have to recognize the danger the black community faces when our cultural artifacts are stolen from us. You have to recognize the danger women of color face when they are not allowed to capitalize off of their own cultural production. You have to do better my brother.
We as a community, and as a nation, have got to do better. And it starts with refuting the post racial myths that mass media continues to preach, and delving into a more critical discussion about how OUR cultural history, and more importantly our labor, continues to be exploited for its marketability.
Signed,
Cheikh Athj, a loyal and disheartened fan
***

Cheikh Athj is a college junior who still hasn’t figured out how this whole "academia" thing works. When he isn’t watching World Star vine compilations, you can find him philosophizing crime, dreaming about utopia, or singing jazz chords. 

Twitter's Role In The Renisha McBride Verdict

HuffPost Live

Twitter's Role In The Renisha McBride Verdict
Renisha McBride's killer, Theodore Wafer, was found guilty of second-degree murder after shooting the teen on his Detroit-area porch in what he had claimed was self defense. Was cyber activism partly responsible for getting Renisha justice?Hosted by: Marc Lamont HillGuests:Dr. Brittney Cooper @ProfessorCrunk (New Brunswick, NJ) Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers UniversityJamilah Lemieux @JamilahLemieux (New York, NY) Senior Editor, Ebony.comTreva Lindsey Ph.D. @divafeminist (Columbus, OH) Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Ohio State University

'Boondocks' Creator Asks, 'What Would Black Jesus Do?

Iraqi-American Rapper TIMZ Spits on ISIS

PRI
Rapper TIMZ (Tommy Hanna) is an Iraqi American who's taking on ISIS, through his music.

Time to Crowdfund Season 2 of 'For Colored Boys'

Director Stacey Muhammad is ready to start production on season 2 of her award winning web series For Colored Boys.  The series offered a compelling and intimate look in to the lives of Black men, with a sophistication rarely seen in contemporary media.   Season 1 of For Colored Boys was supported by a successful crowdfunding campaign.  Here Muhammad and Executive Producer Marc Lamont Hill make their appeal for crowdfunding support for season 2, which will feature veteran actor Charles S. Dutton.

Support For Colored Boys at Indiegogo

The Hip-Hop Fellow Outtakes - DJ Premier Talks the Making of 'Reasonable Doubt'

Price Films
The Hip-Hop Fellow is a feature length documentary following Grammy Award winning producer 9th Wonder's tenure at Harvard University.Interviewees include Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Kendrick Lamar, Young Guru, Dr. Mark Anthony Neal, Phonte, Dr. Marcyliena Morgan, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, Ab-Soul, Rapper Big Pooh & DJ Premier.